Sunday, February 16, 2003

Day after day

I have got to get back into updating this thing regularly. This once-a-week business is getting pathetic. And my sidebar is stale; I've had pretty much the same fiddling little handful of news links in place for almost a year now. Keep meaning to add some more, but I never get round to it. Plus I ought to include some general reference links for you chattering zanies in the vain hope that you might one day bother to fill the vacuum in between your pink'n'shell-likes; Dictionary.com, Wikipedia, that kind of thing. Got to sort that out. I'm jacking the job in at the end of the month, so maybe I'll find time in between all the packing to fix dog carcass up a bit.

So what have I been doing? Okay, on Thursday I got a Seichim attunement to go with my standard-issue Reiki. I don't know that much about it, but from what I can worlk out it's basically the same sort of deal as the basic Reiki (big mysterious healing energy thing uses you as an interdimensional extension cord) only based on this, uhhh, ancient Egyptian wisdom that someone "channelled" *cough*. (I'm not saying it's all made up and fake and worthless, far from it; just that I don't think the people who get these things get them from where they think they're getting them.)

The Seichim attunement was a bit weird. The room we use for the class is always overheated but I got really cold, a bone-deep chill that made me feel like I'd never get warm again. It was as if I was submerged in running water. Apparently this is a good thing. It means that something you don't need anymore is leaving you, some energy is being banished. (Damn, I always choke when I use the e-word in this kind of context. I'm trying to see it as a model that we're using to visualize something that we don't properly understand.) The healing went well; my hands were drawn to my client's upper chest (I was working on the teacher) and she informent me afterwards that she had indeed been coming down with a chest infection and had felt the area warm up. One of the other clients dropped off to sleep during his sesh and woke up from a falling dream with such a start that he scared the hell out of his healer-- not to mention the rest of the class.

On Friday myself and Lurid travelled down to Dublin, as planned. The coach journey took about 5 hours, but it wasn't too bad. I went over my Spanish homework, then just dozed off for a while. We stayed over with an old mate from London who I haven't seen in ages. It was great to catch up. She finds herself in a similar position as me; same age, stuck in a crappy minimum-wage shop-job, trying to scrape a living and build a career at the same time. It was great just getting pissed together and griping about our respective stores-- I feel like much less of a loser now. And fuck, she's just such a cool and amazing person to hang out with anyhow.

On Saturday there was the anti-war demo. I was expecting to be part of a gathering of a couple of thousand people; the actual turnout was more like 50 or 60,000. At first it was a bit crappy, because there were all these passionate, determined people, many of whom obviously dedicated their lives to this kind of thing, and I was all why-bothery and apathetic. I felt like a walking corpse surrounded by the living.

As time wore on though, the scale of the protest became clear. All sorts of people, many of them obvious march virgins, had turned out. The centre of Dublin was at a virtual standstill. Myself and L.A. shuffled along for a few hours, eventually calling it a day and going to check out some news sites in an internet caff. My apathy took a much-deserved kicking as I read the about the sheer number of people who'd turned out against the war. I grabbed a few tracts, even got some bumf about forthcoming demonstrations; I'm keen to take part in a demo at Shannon airport in a couple of weeks, but I want to find out more about the organizers first.